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RESEARCH PRODUCT

The role of Dutch in the development of East Anglian English

subject

description

Dutch speakers may or may not have contributed a certain amount of lexical material to modern East Anglian dialects. There is a much stronger case to be made, however, for arguing that Dutch speakers did have a rather profound infl uence on the morphology of East Anglian English, dating from the time when almost forty percent of the population of the capital of East Anglia, Norwich, were refugees from the Low Countries. That infl uence was indirect, and mediated through mechanisms of linguistic change associated with language contact.